Countdown: H Hour

by Tom Kratman

  “But you don’t really need that crutch, do you, Mr. Kulat? You really do want to cooperate now, don’t you?”

  “Oh, yes . . . oh, yes . . . just ask me something I know, something I can answer.”

  “Very well,” Lox agreed. “But you must remember that your cameraman is as eager to talk to us as you claim to be. And if your answers do not match, there will be more pain and more damage.”

  “Let me talk to him,” Kulat begged. “I’ll convince him to cooperate.”

  “No,” said Lox, somewhat regretfully, “that doesn’t really work. You will answer separately until your answers match.”

  “Describe the beach where you landed!” Lox demanded.

  “There was a high cliff, to the left!” Kulat exclaimed frantically. “We pulled up to a short pier . . . ”

  “How many piers were there?”

  “One!”

  Lox signaled Semmerlin to start the electricity flowing.

  “Two, there were TWO!” Kulat screamed, between spasms.

  The juice cut out after a moment. Lox asked, “Which of the two was longer, north or south?”

  “Nor . . . aiaiaiai! Southsouthsouth!”

  “The first bunker, guarding the trail from the beach, what was in it?”

  “A mach . . . aiaiaiai. Nonono . . . sorrysorry . . . please, no more pain . . . it was a cannon of some kind.”

  “Describe it.”

  “Big . . . three, maybe four inches across, the part I saw. It was something funny shaped on that end, like a cone.”

  “A recoilless rifle?”

  The answer was a sort of long, drawn out, moan. “Yes . . . I think so . . . I hope so. But please, no more pain? Please?”

  “Look at this diagram,” Lox said, pointing to a large sheet of white paper with penciled in symbols. His finger traced a dotted line. “You and Mr. Iqbal came in along this trail”—the finger tapped—“past these two bunkers.” The finger floated to the right and up. “What was here?”

  “A tent,” Kulat answered. “A big tent with smoke coming from the ground nearby. It was thin smoke, coming from a hundred holes. You could barely notice it until you smelled it.”

  “Did they feed you there?”

  “No. No, but when they brought us food it came from there on big leaves.”

  “A mess tent, then.” Lox’s finger drifted. “And what was here . . . ?”

  Both Kulat and Iqbal had been given their clothes back and released from their bindings. With Sergeants Trimble and Yamada as guards, Lox escorted them to a different cell, this one without any instruments of torture. Instead, there were some cots, a couple of bottles, and some packaged food.

  “We can’t let you go until our mission is complete,” Lox informed them. “You’ll be staying here while you’re with us. The clear bottle is water; the darker one is a tore of Tanduay rum.” Tanduay—or at least this mark of Tanduay—was perhaps not the highest-end rum distilled in the Philippines, but it would do. This particular bottle had been further laced with a modicum of opium. Mrs. Ayala’s man, Pedro, was nothing if not resourceful.

  “If your religious scruples forbid you from drinking it, that’s on you. You might find that it helps the pain, though, and, if memory serves, alcohol is permissible as a medicine.”

  In a side room in the main house, Lox poured a San Miguel pilsner for Madame. He placed the amber-filled glass on the table next to her. Also on the table was a voice activated tape recorder, and a speaker that certainly had some desktop computer in its ancestry.

  “And now?” Madame asked, picking up and sipping at the beer.

  “And now we listen. It’s just possible, not likely, but possible, that they’ll talk about something they managed to hide from us. It’s even more likely they’ll confirm what they told us separately, once they start comparing notes.”

  “And if not?”

  “We’ve learned all we can learn in the time we have before they have to make an appearance back in the real world. Maybe if there’s something dramatic, we might put them through the ringer again. But, if not, tonight you can have them.”

  “Good,” she agreed, her voice filled with anticipation.

  “Killing them doesn’t bother you?” Lox asked.

  The old woman chuckled. “Mr. Lox, my husband and I were not always so very respectable. I’ve killed before. And you, does it bother you to torture?”

  “I never have before,” he answered. “And it makes me sick.”

  “Really?” She seemed surprised. “Where did you learn? You seemed quite competent.”

  “Oh,” Lox admitted, “I got it out of a book by some hack science fiction writer.”

  Safe House Alpha, Hagonoy, Bulacan, Luzon,

  Republic of the Philippines

  Whether Kulat and Iqbal were actually drunk by the time the clock had turned past midnight made little difference. A quick glance at the bottle indicated that they would be, in conjunction with the opium, drunk enough for pliability and drunk enough to have the booze show up in their bloodstreams, if anybody bothered to check. If the fire Mrs. Ayala planned left enough for a check of the blood.

  “Load them,” she told Pedro and her other most trusted guard. Taking one each over their shoulders, Madame’s men dumped the two doomed journalists into vehicle trunks, one in the taxi’s trunk, the other in Iqbal’s, atop the camera, tripod, and sound equipment. Then she, her guard, and Welch loaded.

  The two-vehicle convoy then drove north, before turning east at Cabanatuan. Ultimately, they stopped in the deserted section of road in Aurora Memorial National Park.

  Once she’d picked her spot, Madame had the drugged and intoxicated journalists detrunked and laid on either side of Iqbal’s auto. “Measure him, Pedro,” she commanded.

  “Yes, Madame.”

  Pedro took Iqbal and put him in the driver’s seat. Then he rotated him forward and up, as if he’d been tossed that way by a collision. Pedro’s eye carefully noted where Iqbal’s head would strike the windshield, and his body the steering wheel. He then placed the body back on the ground and went to his taxi for a sledgehammer. With this he gave the cameraman a light rap on the skull, no more than enough to split the skin and perhaps cause some minor fracturing of the bone. The cameraman’s ribs received heavier blows, heavy enough, perhaps, to have killed him on their own, eventually.

  Kulat received similar treatment. Welch, standing with his arms crossed over his chest, nodded with satisfaction.

  “Now wreck the car, Pedro.”

  “Yes, Madame.”

  For this, Pedro retrieved from his taxi a crash helmet, as well as some padding for his legs. He sat in the driver’s seat of Iqbal’s vehicle, put on the helmet, and placed the heavy padding in front of his legs. Then he put on the lap and shoulder belt and started the engine.

  With a short, three-point turn, Pedro turned the car around and then drove about a hundred meters back in the direction from which they’d come. There he made another change of direction. After crossing himself, Pedro slammed down on the gas and sped up the road. At just past the place where his taxi rested, he ripped the wheel to his right, aiming for a stout tree. The car smashed into the tree foursquare and head on, crumpling the front and causing steam to jet out through the now bent hood. Pedro was thrown forward to the limits of his restraining belt.

  As he emerged, shaken, the other guard was already carrying Kulat to the passenger side. Pedro shook his head to clear it, then lifted Iqbal and carted him across the road. Mrs. Ayala retrieved the padding, then demanded Pedro’s helmet. Both of these she placed in the taxi.

  “Shoot several holes in the car, Pedro,” she said. When he hesitated, she asked, “You don’t understand why?”

  “No, Madame.”

  She sighed. Pedro was a good man, loyal and true. He was also bright enough, and very resourceful. What he wasn’t was subtle.

  “It doesn’t matter if the police think these men were murdered,” she explained. “Indeed, Mr. Welch”�
�she inclined her head in his direction—“has told me he wants them to. And I can buy our way out of any prosecution or investigation, even if they should equate the murder with us. What matters is that the people holding my husband not know these two spilled their guts. If they found out, they’d move and the information we’ve gained would become useless. For that, it is better that this look like a simple double murder, here on a lonely stretch of road, while they were in hot pursuit of another story or, better, being pursued. For that, we need bullet holes.”

  “Fair enough,” Pedro agreed, drawing his pistol and emptying it into various random and chosen spots around the car. One of these—the only nonrandom spot—was the gasoline tank. With a flashlight, he began to search for the spent casings.

  “Do you think they’ll wake up enough to feel this?” Mrs. Ayala asked, as she bent down with a cigarette lighter in one hand. Pedro shook his head. Madame sighed, “I suppose not, but I hope they do.”

  Hell hath no fury, thought Welch, watching the gasoline take fire and the flames race to where more fuel poured from the ruptured tank.

  “Now, tell me about the demands and instructions they sent you.”

  Welch, Lox, and Graft were seated at one end of a table holding a bucket of ice, three glasses, and a bottle, a tore, of Tanduay. Theirs was of a rather better mark than what they’d left for Kulat and Iqbal. The label said “1854,” though, of course, it wasn’t nearly that old. Fifteen years, though? That, it was.

  Moreover, this tore wasn’t laced with opium.

  At the other end—though not far away; it wasn’t a big table—was a computer, with the best map Lox had been able to find of the Pilas Group of islands. In the center of the image was one island labeled “Caban Island,” blown up as far as it would go before it turned fuzzy.

  “That’s it,” Lox said. “Everything matches. Nothing else in the area really does. Two piers, the cliff south of the beach, the layout of the huts. Can’t see the bunkers but I imagine the Harrikat have learned a thing or two about camouflage by now. On the other hand,”—Lox reached out and tapped the screen with his finger—“if you look closely you can see the smoke coming up out of the ground in lines. That’s the mess tent Kulat and Iqbal identified. He’s there—on that island—if he’s anywhere.”

  “That’s going to be a pure bitch,” Welch observed. “We’ve got no good ins. We can’t lift enough people to matter with the two gunships. And, even if we could, there’s no LZ big enough to get more than one bird in at a time. If we land on the beach, by boat or, if we had them, helicopters, he’s dead before we’ve gotten to the first huts. Not sure that a whole bunch of ours wouldn’t be dead, too.”

  “We’ve got to get someone in there,” said Graft, “to find and secure him while the rest of the force lands, however they end up landing.”

  “Suggestions?” Welch asked.

  Graft shook his head, but the gesture had more of despair to it than negation. His finger tapped the map at the southwestern edge of the island. “Two men,” he said. “That’s all we can get in with the two SeaBobs. They go in underwater to this cliff. Then they free climb up the cliff—yeah, it’ll be a bitch. They take out the guards—there have gotta be guards there; it’s the highest point on the island—to clear the way for follow-on forces to come in by Zodiac. If they can find Ayala and get him back to that point, with plenty of gunship support the company can hold the Harrikat off until we get the infantry company ashore.

  “Shit.”

  “Why ‘shit’?” Welch asked.

  “Because I’m the best free climber in the company, that’s why ‘shit.’ And I am not looking forward to this.”

  “It’s something to study, anyway,” Welch said, noncommittally.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Australia wanted the Gurkhas in 1990. Even today, Australia recruits Gurkhas who have served as much as 15 years with the British forces, which shows how highly they are regarded. It’s possible they, or other nations, would be interested if Britain no longer wanted us.

  —Chhatra Rai, Gurkha Veteran

  MV Richard Bland, South of Mauritius

  The ship functioned well enough, still, but only as a kind of a floating prison. The various military contingents lived separately and messed at separate times, with armed guards from the aviation detachment, the landing craft crew, headquarters and support, and the Bland, itself, ensuring peace. They got an hour a day, more or less, to exercise and breathe fresh air on the containers, topside.

  There were a few exceptions, the Gurkhas who’d tried to keep peace during the riot, and the officers and senior noncoms, other than most of the senior non-coms from the spec ops company, almost all of whom had been in the thick of it.

  Having nothing much else to do today, what with his troops locked down, Sergeant Balbahadur mostly stayed on deck, practicing with his pipes. After all, war pipes, in the close confines of the ship, tended to be kind of. . . . loud.

  “Sergeant Hallinan, Sergeant Feeney, it’s your time to go topside.”

  There were two armed guards, both naval. Warrington had been insistent. “One might tempt them.”

  Hallinan nodded and stood. “C’mon, Feeney, we’ve got our daily break from staring at the corrugated walls.”

  Hallinan felt miserable and had ever since the riot. Deep in his bones he was sure, absolutely certain, that it was all his fault. I could have just put the goddamned rifle on safe, then taken it up with the chain of command later. But nooo, I had to be a wise ass. And now the whole fucking mission is up in the air. Jesus, fuck me to tears; I never expected anything like this.

  A baker’s dozen of them—A and C companies, both—slowly assembled on the mess deck, just in time to see fourteen others marched down from topside and returned, still under guard, to their quarters. The men who’d escorted Feeney and Hallinan turned them over to four other guards, then went back for a couple more. It took fifteen minutes, at least, to round up the entire party. That hour’s break tended to be less than that. Once they were all present one of the guards opened up a hatch at the high end of a ladder—actually a set of stairs but it would never do in naval circles to call something by its everyday name—and motioned them up. The men climbed four ladders before reaching the level of the top containers. There another hatch was opened. As it was, Hallinan heard the strains of what he thought he recognized as The Black Bear . . .

  “On the pipes? Who’s paying the pipes? Who for the love of God even could be playing the pipes, here?”

  “One of the Gurkhas,” replied a petty officer, Kirkpatrick, normally in charge of the LCM and now bearing a loaded shotgun. The petty officer rolled his eyes, adding, “He’s been at it all fucking day, too.”

  By the time Hallinan reached the Gurkha, the tune had changed from “The Black Bear” to “Scots Wha Hae.” That one, Hallinan knew. He stood there, perhaps a bit dumb looking, but definitely not dumb as he sang along:

  “Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled,

  Scots wham Bruce has often led,

  Welcome tae yer gory bed . . . ”

  Sergeant Balbahadur could hardly smile, what with the blowpipe stuck in his mouth. He did take his right hand off the chanter—screwing up a note in the process—to encourage Hallinan to sing along, but louder.

  “Now’s the day and now’s the hour.

  See the front of battle lour.

  See approach proud Edward’s power.

  Chains and slavery . . .

  . . . Let us do or dee!”

  The Gurkha finished the piece with a couple of flourishes, then let it die away with a sound not entirely dissimilar to what one might hear from three cats caught in a blender.

  “Where did you learn the song?” Balbahadur asked. His English was replete with received pronunciation, something unusual in a Gurkha.

  “From my grandmother, who got it from her mother,” Hallinan said. “Where did you learn the pipes? And to speak English like that. I heard the others speaking once and they have a p
retty strong accent.”

  “I learned from Second Battalion, Gurkha Rifles,” answered Balbahadur. “Both things, I mean. We—the Brigade of Gurkhas—picked up the pipes from Scots regiments, in India. Oh, a long time ago, it was. I picked up the English because, well, I was a line boy, born within the regiment. The others aren’t. And they tell me I have a terrible Brit accent in Nepali.

  “My father was Gurkha Rifles. So was his father and his grandfather. And I was born in the UK, at the Royal Victoria Hospital, in Folkestone.”

  Balbahadur held out his hand to shake, giving his name—“Or just Bal, for short”—and asking, “And you are?”

  “Hallinan, Alex, Bal. Are you sure you want to shake my hand? I mean, this”—Hallinan indicated the guards and quasi prisoners with a wave of his hand—“is all my fault.”

  “Oh, bullshit,” the Gurkha said. “You think that little thing with the safety—oh, yes, we all heard about it—caused all this? Nonsense; you’re not that important, Al.”

  “No,” Balbahadur insisted, “you didn’t start this. It started over pay.”

  “What?”

  “It started with the pay differential between Euros, Americans, and honorary westerners like me and the other Gurkhas, and the Guyanan locals. Yeah, they make two-three-four times what they could expect to make in Guyana, if they could even find a job. And, yeah, the pay index holds out the promise of making the same pay as we do, eventually. Though it doesn’t hold out the hope, ever, of making the same cost of living allowance because there is no cost of living allowance for Guyanans. It’s all based on having to support a family in America or Europe. Which is, frankly, bullshit, because almost everyone with a family has that family in corporate housing, right around Camp Fulton.